Slides Andrew Hsu recently used in his discussion w/ mentees of The Product Mentor. Synopsis: How to thoughtfully include everyone's experience to build the most effective product. "Absorbing what is useful, discarding what is not, adding what is uniquely your own. " The Product Mentor is a program designed to pair Product Mentors and Mentees from around the World, across all industries, from start-up to enterprise, guided by the fundamental goals…Better Decisions. Better Products. Better Product People. Throughout the program, each mentor leads a conversation in an area of their expertise that is live streamed and available to both mentee and the broader product community. http://TheProductMentor.com

1. Rediscovering and implementing Agile’s roots
Agile across the business
Andrew Hsu
Product Manager at Vega Factor
March 12, 2017

2. ● Typical Agile
● Our tweaks
● Current challenges
● Ideas to try
Contents

3. Typical Agile

4. Typical Agile work cycle
● Problem(s)
● Break it down - sprints & features
● Estimate
● Prioritize
● Adapt daily
● Rinse & repeat

5. Issues
● Engineering team focused
○ Lack of business collaboration
● Lack of timeline discussions
● Highly optimized leaves
○ Hard to drive innovation or large changes

6. Upon further investigation
● Agile creators had it figured out
○ http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
● Many Agile articles overly focus on optimizing engineering teams
● How do we optimize Agile for the business as a whole?

7. Our tweaks

8. Implementation
● Team structure
● Solving problems together
● Estimation
● Weekly routines
● Retrospectives

9. “The best architectures, requirements, and
designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
Team structure • Solving problems together • Estimation • Weekly routines • Retrospectives

10. Product Platform
Business POD
Engineering POD
Module 1 POD
APE
Module 2 POD
APE
Module 3 POD
APE
Marketing POD
Product POD
Team structure • Solving problems together • Estimation • Weekly routines • Retrospectives

11. Team structure • Solving problems together • Estimation • Weekly routines • Retrospectives
“Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.”

12. Team structure • Solving problems together • Estimation • Weekly routines • Retrospectives

13. “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through
early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
“Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work
not done--is essential.”
Team structure • Solving problems together • Estimation • Weekly routines • Retrospectives

14. Rules of thumb
● List of needs (in consensus)
● Product writes out requirements
● Drive discussion with engineering
● What’s the minimum we can build for an effective test & to deliver value
● Discuss time vs. business value
● Summarize what will be achieved in 2 weeks
● Pressure test with all parties
Team structure • Solving problems together • Estimation • Weekly routines • Retrospectives

15. “The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a
development team is face-to-face conversation.”
Team structure • Solving problems together • Estimation • Weekly routines • Retrospectives

16. Staging cut weeks
Team structure • Solving problems together • Estimation • Weekly routines • Retrospectives
Prioritization
APE work + stories into Pivotal
POD Retro
M
T
W
Th
F
Production cut weeks
Prioritization
POD estimation
POD Problem solving,
planning, prioritization
meeting
M
T
W
Th
F

17. “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to
become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its
behavior accordingly.”
Team structure • Solving problems together • Estimation • Weekly routines • Retrospectives

18. Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what
they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
Team structure • Solving problems together • Estimation • Weekly routines • Retrospectives

19. Current challenges

20. Current challenges
● Electronic tools per POD
○ Planning, communication, documentation
○ Getting people on the same mediums
● Duping of feature tickets across trackers & different altitudes of each ticket
● Meeting routines
○ Right people in the right meetings
○ Efficient topic time allocation at meetings
● Internalize our new structures and routines
○ I’m in 5 pods

21. Ideas to try

22. Ideas to try
I hope something in this presentation helps make Agile more inclusive and
effective for you.
● Get cross functional - form a POD or facilitate new conversations
● Drive consensus - for one feature, pressure test it across departments
● Set up a retro
● Set up a weekly routine for improvement

23. Thanks!
andrew@luminationcollective.com